Monday, December 03, 2018

Voxiversity 010: Rhetoric and Dialectic is a bit different than previous Voxiversities, as it was filmed live in Barcelona in front of the Foundation members, who chose the topic and were throwing me questions while we were filming in order to help me remember to hit some of the important aspects of the subject.

The live element definitely led to some minor issues, such as the wind interfering with the audio and me declaring incorrectly that Aristotle lived around 2400 BC. Just to be clear, the latter is NOT true, he lived about 2400 years ago. But these mistakes notwithstanding, viewers are already declaring this to be one of the best and most substantive Voxiversities of the ten to date.

As you can see from the video, we had a really good time at the Foundation meeting and there was considerable strategerizing. We expect to announce one of the chief outcomes of that meeting early in the new year.

Vox, do you think that calling people "Cultural Marxists" was ever good rhetoric, at least at a time when the openly Marxist Soviet Union was the main enemy of the US and the West? If yes, is it still good rhetoric today, when the main enemy, globalism, tries to conceal its connection to the Cultural Marxists of yesterday, and has a hold on education so that people today are not taught the dangers of marxism anymore? And if it is not good rhetoric, as I believe, what would be a good substitute? I think that the answer to this question is very important in the political changes going on in Brazil.

I had tried to ask this via email first but maybe it got lost in your box, or maybe you didn't care to answer, which is of course your right; I wouldn't even ask it again if this video about Rhetorics and Dialectics had not appeared so soon after my question.

Cultural Marxists is not strong rhetoric, because people who happily wear Che on their shirts and dye their hair blue don't mind being called Marxists in the least. It's not bad in terms of rhetorically identifying the enemy to neutrals; it probably is very persuasive to conservatives who are locked into a Left-Right perspective rather than the more relevant Nationalist-Globalist or Satanist-Christian perspectives.

Rhetoric is emotion, so the question depends upon whom you are trying to emotionally affect. In this case, it's good rhetoric for neutrals, very poor rhetoric for targets.

This is an excellent presentation – clear, engaging, and packed with useful information without seeming pedantic at all, and just the right amount of triggering in the opening. The perfect tweet is a nice close. Overall, it is ideal for sharing, I’ve made this comment before, but it is worth repeating that the whole team is firing on all cylinders.

Cultural Marxism calls attention to a powerful aspect of globalist rhetoric – how hard it is to concisely identify who they are. If you are immersed in this, you are aware of the webs, but they work hard to stop any catch-all from gaining traction, like the surface of an adaptive virus. It’s like the no leaders strategy on an intergenerational cultural movement level.

Really great stuff. You sometimes come across a little stiff, contrast with very relaxed in this video. Tight editing kept the narrative on-point - again you sometimes either wander or attempt to speak the four ideas that you're branching on at once; whereas this was on rails.

All in all, it looks like you're continuing to refine and perfect the presentation of these Voxiversity videos. Now if you had a minion to add an exhaustive list of references to each one, that'd be even better, at least for me. Some people find citations very convincing by their mere existence, a fact that's been used as academic sleight-of-hand for decades, even if it's more famously associated with Wikipedia these days.

Rhetoric is emotion, so the question depends upon whom you are trying to emotionally affect. In this case, it's good rhetoric for neutrals, very poor rhetoric for targets.

Is it really poor though? For example, "dems are the real racists" is so ineffective that leftists don't even bother to react. But cultural marxism tends to get reactions. You can see all kinds of "debunkings" how there really isn't such a thing. So at least that term gets them on the defence which indicates some sensitivity.

Great video! My favorite rhetoric is the picture of the beautiful white girl in the background, with the toothless aborigine in front.

One could simply find a picture of a beautiful mulatto like Halle Berry or something, and a fat, toothless white person (reversing polarity) and destroy this rhetoric. But nobody thinks of that, and I'm sure the meme as stands makes the point that race is real in a rhetorical sense. Dialectic would be a checklist of beauty measurements, and then a corresponding ratio of how many women in any particular group met these requirements, does IQ correspond with beauty, etc. Nobody wants to read that book, lol.

FWIW, I don't think "NPC" will stick, because the reality is that rank-and-file righties are just as much NPC as lefties, and lefties generally believe that their positions are based on sound logic. Indeed, they mostly are, if you are willing to accept incorrect assumptions.

I don't think "NPC" will stick, because the reality is that rank-and-file righties are just as much NPC as lefties, and lefties generally believe that their positions are based on sound logic.

You're wrong, because you are doing what dialectics-obsessed always do when trying to analyze rhetoric. IT IS NOT ABOUT YOU.

They've already shown that they hate it and are emotionally susceptible to it. Which you should have known, considering how they fetishize terms like "thoughtful" and "independent". NPC completely violates those self-perceptions.

In Christian theology a person has to be willing to admit to being a sinner to overcome sin. Going by what I have seen, in dialectic theology a person has to admit to being effected by the rhetoric to overcome it. Imagining that one's thoughts are the product of pure reason is the equivalent of not being willing to admit to sin. We are all taken in by rhetoric, dialectic is the willingness to reflect on it.

Conservatives hate rhetoric because they fail every shit test sent their way. If I only could mass produce butthurt cream by the truck load and move it thru talk radio advertising I would own the world

This was great. I finally learned about the whole "Drumpf" thing. WTF? This was all about a name change? So what? My father's side of the family used to have an umlaut over a vowel in our surname. (Origin: Germany.) They removed it when they came here. Because assimilation, NPC motherf*ckers.

I couldn't possibly call it anything other than stupid. And the fact that John Oliver was pushing it is even better.

Korppi on oikeus wrote:Like the "Social Justice Warrior", a "Strong Independent Woman" could become effective retoric at some point. Like the former, it is a positive description which some already use as a slur.

Dirk Manly wrote:NPC flips everything upside down, and labels their reflexive, non-sequitor squid-ink responses as fact-free garbage, which only an idiot would buy into.More than that, it's preprogramed and implies that they have no free will, only following a script.

Heck, it would make for a devastating series of ads by a 3rd-party against the [essentially] forced-binary choice of Democrat vs Republican -- Imagine an ad with a caricatureized-robot voter, complete with the Dalek voice-changer effect, saying "NPC-bot must vote Democrat or Republican." or Republican-specific "NPC-bot must vote for Republican party because of [Firearm Freedoms]*, despite their inaction on [Firearm Freedoms]*." or Democrat-specific "NPC-bot must vote for endless immigration, must replace EVIL WHITE CHRISTIAN voters!"

* Case in point: how many Republicans have *EVER* voiced support for repeal of GCA or NFA? And it actually works for almost ANY Republican-party plank: abortion, fiscal responsibility, governmental accountability, tax-reform, repealing Obamacare, etc.

"because the one thing they value above everything else, is being seen as "the smartest guy in the room.""

It's not because of intellect. Social Justice Warriors are an outgrowth of secular humanism - the one thing they flaunt above everything else is their sense of humanity, and their love of "human beings" as some weirdo monolith. "NPC" literally insinuates that they are not even humans - but robots programmed to say those kinds of things, either for nefarious purposes or otherwise. That's why they complain so much about the fact that it's "dehumanizing", it robs them of their favorite weapon, which is endless appeals to humanitarianism.

The meme wars have beeen a great lesson in rhetoric. I was surprised how effective "orange man bad" and NPC became. What is the point of the dems are the real racists, the real hypocrits, the real meanies, etc? Is it just outrage fuel for the right? Because, like you said, it doesn't get a reaction from the left.

My favorite failed rhetoric is still Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables." The right flipped it to adorable deplorables and les deplorables and it became a battle cry. The left trying to own Trump's "nasty woman" was cringingly hilarious.

"The whole 'conservatives are npcs too' is dumb. I'm sure any group can be broken down into observable patterns. Congrats."

Yeah, they try to say we're NPCs who blindly follow Trump. Never mind that it takes much more brainpower to decide to follow a single man who's maligned by literally everyone of influence in the country rather than... everyone of influence in the country.

Conservatives aren't traditionally great at rhetoric because they want to be reasonable and don't understand why being reasonable doesn't work. If they were more self-aware, they would recognize how much they are affected and thrown into defensive positions by the left's rhetoric. But without self-awareness, they find themselves appeasing the left instead, trying to convince their oppobents with their reasonableness yet again in a never-ending cycle of failure. Trump knocked that idea out of the water for a lot of people, except the never-Trumpers who would rather drown with their reasonableness intact.

Great video. It says something that this distinction between rhetoric and dialectic and the many forms of rhetoric used to be taught to those who graduated high school at the turn of the 20th century, or at least covered in any liberal education. Now so few know or understand (what some old white guy 2400 years ago--no ) these basic precepts on how we understand things that they have been basically forgotten instead of something any man of education knew and used.

Well, done as in your example, yes, it weakens it. But separated as two seperate statements -- first the rhetorical, with the dialectic used as a rejoinder, then that will strengthen it.

Observe:

Sane person: You're just another NPC

NPC: No, I"m not!

Sane Person: You're just regurgitating the pre-programmed phrases that your enemies-of-the-people professors force-fed to you. And the sad part is ... you enjoy it, like some twisted globalist version the Stepford Wives.

The Rhetorical/Dialectical ratio in propaganda and its convex relationship to liberty and freedom in a complex society.In a relatively antifragile society the ratio of rhetoric to dialectic discourse in a given society remains relatively stable when said civilization's core economic applications create positive long lasting prosperity for the majority of its citizens. For the purposes of this argument let us assume that in any given political article, TV segment, or speech a healthy ratio of rhetoric to dialectic is 4 to 1, where every minute devoted to rhetoric there is one minute devoted to dialectic to satiate the intellectual as well as the average watcher or reader of said material. When the economic policies begin to undermine the social frabric of society and core economic beliefs are antithetical to economic reality but are beneficial to the established oligarch class the rhetoric/dialectic ratio skews heavier and heavier to rhetoric until finally dialectic is abandoned altogether in favor of simple repetitive Memes and slogans. Consequently this naturally alienates the intellectual and causes a negative feedback of nihilism and cynicism which gives rise to the revolutionary spirit and increases the chance of insurrection and unrest. Such societies have two choices one way is to accept change and force the oligarch to abandon hard held beliefs and sacrifice power for the benefit of society or turn to totalitarianism to maintain power and suppress rationality and accurate assessment of society. The EU and the deep state of the US have chosen the former and it is up to the true patriots to rise up and overthrow the corrupt system in order to ensure the safety and prosperity of our children's future.